Over the past 15-20 years I've known many Gateway customers. Tech-savvy users, grandmas, University departments, small businesses, all have one thing in common: every single person or group I've ever known to have bought a Gateway PC has had to call their tech support line about something.
How do I know this? After the first two or three, I started to ask: "How was their tech support?" They'd usually answer matter-of-factly, "Oh, they were great. There was this little problem, but they helped me fix it right away."
Sometimes they'd say no, and I'd ask, "Really? You're the first." Then they'd respond with "Oh, well, now that you mention it, there was this problem with the [memory, hard disk, keyboard, missing item, whatever], but they helped me fix it right away."
This yahoo's attempt to insert "theory" after "Big Bang" in press releases is not out of want for scientific rigor [...]
Right, and apparently he's not smart enough to spin it that way. I started out trying to play devil's advocate, so to speak, but really couldn't do the job.
"It is not the job of public-affairs officers," Dr. Griffin wrote in an e-mail message to the agency's 19,000 employees, "to alter, filter or adjust engineering or scientific material produced by NASA's technical staff."
I know the group-think is that Mr. Deutch is out of line, a right-wing religious political hack. And that's accurate, I think.
On the other hand, "The Big Bang is a theory, like relativity. It's there because it explains something in a workable way, until someone comes along with something better. That needs to be noted in NASA's work if we want to be credible." Deutch should have said that, but he didn't. Anyone attending a scientific conference knows that the Big Bang is a theory.
The real trouble isn't trying to balance NASA's coverage of the origins of the universe, but editing the individual works of other people. It's one thing to edit a web site, but it's over the line when you start editing conference presentations.
But I don't really like the thought of creating and killing millions/billions of things that are/maybe/might be/could have been/sorta/etc humans to get there. I suspect a lot of folks are caught in that halfway position.
I think you've summed it up nicely. The ethical equation isn't "this thing must die so I can live". It's "this thing, and lots of others like it, must die so that someone in the future may be able to live a while longer".
If the benefits could be laid out directly, and the cost quantified, it would be easier.
It dosn't mean a right to travel in a specific way
Ah, but if it doesn't mean the right to travel in any specific way, then the government can lock down many different specific ways, such as airplanes, trains, autos, using a vehicle, or not using a vehicle.
I don't have a problem with people having to show ID to get on a plane. That's not an impediment to travel, except to criminals and terrorists. I can accept that compromise between security and freedom.
What I don't like is the idea that I need the government's permission to move around, which is what "no specific means of travel" implies.
And I never said my right to travel meant someone else had the obligation to take me.
I have always thought of the right to travel as one of the Big Three, along with bearing arms and speaking. After all, if you have those three the others tend to follow.
A guard at the border is the first thing a tyrant wants.
They didn't put "the right of a citizen to move freely among the several states, and to leave and return to the United States" in the Constitution explicitly because it underpins, and is implied by, the others. They should have, and we should do it now.
Paper and electronic ballots each have points of weakness. Doing both hedges our bets, since the techniques for messing with them are mostly orhogonal. Having the voter look at his ballot removes any chance for the ballot making machine to skew the results. Counting them both makes it really hard to hide local trickery or incompetence.
Exit polls are not credible. They rely on people telling a reporter something, and the reporter getting it right. It's more likely, especially in a contested race or a blowout, that only people who think that they will agree with the reporter will talk to one.
The worst story I have heard about global warming was on NPR and some research group claimed that we are past the point of no return meaning that it doesn't matter what we do at this point, the permafrost is melting at an unstoppable rate and our world is going to change very rapidly into something uninhabitable.
When dealing with anything in the media (especially on C-SPAN:-), you have to think about the agenda of the person or group behind it. What do they have to gain by saying it, and why is it being reported?
That's not to say that the world isn't getting warmer. The sky may or may not be falling. It's just that NPR and its sources definitely have an agenda, which includes making you believe that the sky is falling.
There's nothing magical about something frozen that somehow makes it a better heat sink than something that's not frozen. A large body of frozen land at -1C has 2 degrees more capacity than one at 1C, no more, no less. The local ecosystem's going to be different, but not its ability to absorb heat. Its water content is a different matter, but it's an open question whether formerly permafrosted areas will be wetter or drier after they melt.
What's more, the Earth as a whole is primarily cooled by radiation from deserts at night, not by heat absorption in permafrost. Winds from the frozen polar areas do cool the ones in lower latitudes, but it's primarily winds at 40,000 feet. They don't know if the land below is frozen or not.
Europe went through a "Dark Ages" period, in part because it was too damn cold for about 1000 years. It might be we're still coming out of that.
Or maybe the whole thing is because Americans are all driving SUVs instead of Jettas. I don't know. I drive a Jetta.
In other words, don't jump off a bridge. Just do your part to make it better, or at least not to make it worse.
Doing what you love is fine. If it's marketable. The real trick is becoming valuable to the market at what you love.
No, the trick is believing that if you do what you love, it will be marketable -- enough to sustain you, anyway.
I grew up loving computers, at a time when it wasn't cool. I always knew they were my work (once the pro athlete thing fizzled:-). I couldn't be a stock analyst or a garbage collector, but I trust that there are people for whom those jobs are the end of the rainbow. I don't care much about money, as long as there's enough and I'm not in debt when I'm old. I just want to hack.
The other point is, there is always an angle, a way to make money if that's your real goal. There are a lot or rich (financially independent) garbage haulers. They start off hauling trash, then buy their own truck, or start a junk business, or something else in the field of waste reclamation. There's always a way to make money off something that's a least tangential to your avocation, no matter what it is.
It's amazing to me how adept markedrones have become in spinning reality to fit their needs.
Spam still chokes mail gateways and causes everyone who uses email a hassle. You still can't advertize your email address. Upwards of 90% of the mail that reaches my mail server is spam, usually. Mail filters have been there for more than two years, though they've gotten better as spam has gotten better.
Spam volume has leveled off, but that's mostly because the system is already saturated.
If Microsoft really wanted to do something about spam, they'd fix the bugs and unthinkable design decisions that has allowed their software to be taken over and used to send it.
Looking back at the thread, it appears I've given you the impression that I think you grade unfairly. I don't think that, nor do I care about grades in this context.
You do realize that "opinion" and "bias" don't mean the same thing
Of course. Opinions are merely symptoms of underlying beliefs, beliefs which also generate bias toward the opinions of others.
That is why I said you can't give your opinions without revealing a bias. Everyone has biases. There's no shame in it. The trick, which I believe you are able to perform, is to keep your biases separate from your objective criteria in other matters.
By your refusal to abstain from creating a herd mentality in your classroom, however, you demonstrate your lack of confidence in the rightness of your positions. Given a level playing field, apparently, your ideas aren't good enough to win.
Much of what I strive to convey to students is the ability to think for themselves.
That is as I expected. Most (or all) professors have that as a goal. The trouble is, you can't do it by showing a bias yourself. The student doesn't know what is fact and what is opinion. You should keep your (political) opinions to yourself, and resist the temptation to convey them. Either that, or admit that you see a loco parentis role for yourself in spreading your opinions to your students. You can't have it both ways.
Professional opinions or hypotheses are another matter, of course.
I suggest you try, as a experiment, hiding your bias and not allowing a herd to develop in your classroom. I suspect you'll see an improvement in the overall quality of the discussion. You might even get a paper out of it.
Talk of a "paper trail" is a lot of noise and a red herring. The real issue is that validity, origin, and authenticity of the poll data. That can be done with or without paper.
No it's not, yes that's right, but no it can't.
I think you're reacting to a misreading of the term "paper trail". The official ballot has to remain tangible, because it makes a chain of custody possible. That means paper (or punched metal, or whatever). Electronic ballots are subject to a range of tomfoolery that make the process unsuitable for chain of custody, recounts, and the all-important public trust.
The electronic ballots get counted first, naturally, and sent in. That makes getting unofficial results very quick, suitable for our instant gratification-based world.
But the official count is done, by hand or machine, with the paper ballots which were printed out and (presumably) were individually verified by the voter.
Any discrepancy between the paper ballots and the electronic ones triggers a recount. If it's really bad, say a 1% difference, you bring in the accountants and lawyers.
You believe Moore's lies and distortions because you want them to be true.
Diebold is a fine example of how the small-mindedness of some people manifests itself. Particularly, it shows that proprietary softare and oafish business practices are next of kin.
But it has nothing to do with President Bush.
You defend Moore's dishonesty, but tout Diebold's ineptitude as evidence of President Bush's alleged corruption because his brother is governor of Florida?
The point is not merely that a professor's grading habits may be influenced by his biases. Of course they are. If that were the only problem, a prof's academic integrity would be a suitable counterbalance.
It's not professors having opinions that is the problem. It's that expressing those opinions creates a herd mentality in the classroom. Disagreeing with those opinions means fighting the herd, something a young person finds difficult, and should not be forced, to do.
The problem is the environment. The professor is an authority with the full weight of the presumed wisdom of a civilization behind him, and the students are paying to receive knowledge from him. Students expect to learn, and have to have open minds to get the most out of their studies. Students shouldn't have to filter the chaff of political opinion from the grain of truth with which it's presented.
You should have simply rebooted to the XP side and run the updates. If you want the luxury of a dual-boot system, you should be willing to maintain both halves.
My policy for dual-boot machines is this: No. You can have two machines. I'll get you two monitors you can use dual-head on each machine, a KVM, your own switch, and I'll even clean the goo off your keyboard. But I won't manage a dual boot machine, and I don't want them on my network.
Why?
One side is always down, meaning network monitors need special work
Either both sides share one IP address, or each gets its own. Either figure out which one is running, or figure out which address to use.
It requires physical intervention (or extraordinary hacks) to reboot remotely to the other OS
I can't just wax the whole thing if something goes wrong
Rebooting implies root access for whoever is around
In business, there are two conflicting necessities: stay with what you know, and diversify. You have to stay with what you know or the competition (in areas you don't understand) will eat you alive. You have to diversify, or grow stagnant and then die when your niche has a downturn.
Google is diversifying, while staying in the ad business. It's not like they bought a shoe company or something. The cliche they'll use is probably "synergy".
I mean, I know windows security is bad, but is it really considered a compromise to simply be on the same network as the attacker's machine?
Yes. Windows trusts the network. Think Active Directory. If you can trick a Windows machine into thinking you are on its network, it will happily let you be its partner (or maybe even its server) on that network. Though you probably can't trick it into being an AD client right off, you can find out all kinds of things about it, such as any shares it has open.
This vulnerability is an enabler, rather than a gaping hole.
What I hate is Windows' inability to route on multiple network cards. If a user is on a wireless link and they go somewhere where they plug in, Windows still thinks the wireless card is the active connection. It's been that way for years, going back to modem-PPP connections.
Also, if you have both a wired connection and a wireless (or modem) connection and leave the wired network (connecting over wireless (or modem)), Windows can't find IP addresses that are on the wired subnet. If you have a web server on a network at work, you can't connect there over the wireless/modem link. You have to disable the wired network connection, and then it works. What a design!
Slashdot Mirror
Holy electrodes, that was a great study.
We so rock. We figured out how rats thought.
Because we saw the cells firing while the rats were resting.
Because we saw how the cells were firing while the rats were in the maze.
Because we ran the rats through the maze.
Because we thought up this experiment.
Because we went to MIT.
Because Cal Tech wouldn't take us, and Illinois is only for really smart people.
That happened when knew we'd never get laid anyway, and we didn't want to get jobs, so we'd better find a way into grad school....
We rock. Rats thinking backwards, maze, MIT, chicks.
Rats thinking maze MIT chicks.
Rats chicks.
Chicks.
The point is that everyone has to call. That means the product is crap.
you little pipsqueak, come over here and say that!
Over the past 15-20 years I've known many Gateway customers. Tech-savvy users, grandmas, University departments, small businesses, all have one thing in common: every single person or group I've ever known to have bought a Gateway PC has had to call their tech support line about something.
How do I know this? After the first two or three, I started to ask: "How was their tech support?" They'd usually answer matter-of-factly, "Oh, they were great. There was this little problem, but they helped me fix it right away."
Sometimes they'd say no, and I'd ask, "Really? You're the first." Then they'd respond with "Oh, well, now that you mention it, there was this problem with the [memory, hard disk, keyboard, missing item, whatever], but they helped me fix it right away."
lack of forceful "no. don't touch" from smart management
That was one of the most interesting posts evar (or at least today).
(And to think I let my last two mod points go to something I don't even remember. Maybe they lapsed. See, I don't remember.)
Right, and apparently he's not smart enough to spin it that way. I started out trying to play devil's advocate, so to speak, but really couldn't do the job.
I know the group-think is that Mr. Deutch is out of line, a right-wing religious political hack. And that's accurate, I think.
On the other hand, "The Big Bang is a theory, like relativity. It's there because it explains something in a workable way, until someone comes along with something better. That needs to be noted in NASA's work if we want to be credible." Deutch should have said that, but he didn't. Anyone attending a scientific conference knows that the Big Bang is a theory.
The real trouble isn't trying to balance NASA's coverage of the origins of the universe, but editing the individual works of other people. It's one thing to edit a web site, but it's over the line when you start editing conference presentations.
I think you've summed it up nicely. The ethical equation isn't "this thing must die so I can live". It's "this thing, and lots of others like it, must die so that someone in the future may be able to live a while longer".
If the benefits could be laid out directly, and the cost quantified, it would be easier.
Ah, but if it doesn't mean the right to travel in any specific way, then the government can lock down many different specific ways, such as airplanes, trains, autos, using a vehicle, or not using a vehicle.
I don't have a problem with people having to show ID to get on a plane. That's not an impediment to travel, except to criminals and terrorists. I can accept that compromise between security and freedom.
What I don't like is the idea that I need the government's permission to move around, which is what "no specific means of travel" implies.
And I never said my right to travel meant someone else had the obligation to take me.
I have always thought of the right to travel as one of the Big Three, along with bearing arms and speaking. After all, if you have those three the others tend to follow.
A guard at the border is the first thing a tyrant wants.
They didn't put "the right of a citizen to move freely among the several states, and to leave and return to the United States" in the Constitution explicitly because it underpins, and is implied by, the others. They should have, and we should do it now.
Paper and electronic ballots each have points of weakness. Doing both hedges our bets, since the techniques for messing with them are mostly orhogonal. Having the voter look at his ballot removes any chance for the ballot making machine to skew the results. Counting them both makes it really hard to hide local trickery or incompetence.
Exit polls are not credible. They rely on people telling a reporter something, and the reporter getting it right. It's more likely, especially in a contested race or a blowout, that only people who think that they will agree with the reporter will talk to one.
When dealing with anything in the media (especially on C-SPAN :-), you have to think about the agenda of the person or group behind it. What do they have to gain by saying it, and why is it being reported?
That's not to say that the world isn't getting warmer. The sky may or may not be falling. It's just that NPR and its sources definitely have an agenda, which includes making you believe that the sky is falling.
There's nothing magical about something frozen that somehow makes it a better heat sink than something that's not frozen. A large body of frozen land at -1C has 2 degrees more capacity than one at 1C, no more, no less. The local ecosystem's going to be different, but not its ability to absorb heat. Its water content is a different matter, but it's an open question whether formerly permafrosted areas will be wetter or drier after they melt.
What's more, the Earth as a whole is primarily cooled by radiation from deserts at night, not by heat absorption in permafrost. Winds from the frozen polar areas do cool the ones in lower latitudes, but it's primarily winds at 40,000 feet. They don't know if the land below is frozen or not.
Europe went through a "Dark Ages" period, in part because it was too damn cold for about 1000 years. It might be we're still coming out of that.
Or maybe the whole thing is because Americans are all driving SUVs instead of Jettas. I don't know. I drive a Jetta.
In other words, don't jump off a bridge. Just do your part to make it better, or at least not to make it worse.
No, the trick is believing that if you do what you love, it will be marketable -- enough to sustain you, anyway.
I grew up loving computers, at a time when it wasn't cool. I always knew they were my work (once the pro athlete thing fizzled :-). I couldn't be a stock analyst or a garbage collector, but I trust that there are people for whom those jobs are the end of the rainbow. I don't care much about money, as long as there's enough and I'm not in debt when I'm old. I just want to hack.
The other point is, there is always an angle, a way to make money if that's your real goal. There are a lot or rich (financially independent) garbage haulers. They start off hauling trash, then buy their own truck, or start a junk business, or something else in the field of waste reclamation. There's always a way to make money off something that's a least tangential to your avocation, no matter what it is.
It's amazing to me how adept markedrones have become in spinning reality to fit their needs.
Spam still chokes mail gateways and causes everyone who uses email a hassle. You still can't advertize your email address. Upwards of 90% of the mail that reaches my mail server is spam, usually. Mail filters have been there for more than two years, though they've gotten better as spam has gotten better.
Spam volume has leveled off, but that's mostly because the system is already saturated.
If Microsoft really wanted to do something about spam, they'd fix the bugs and unthinkable design decisions that has allowed their software to be taken over and used to send it.
>accuse me of unfairness
No, just the opposite. Reread my post.
On the other hand, I do have the idea that you might struggle at introspection.
Looking back at the thread, it appears I've given you the impression that I think you grade unfairly. I don't think that, nor do I care about grades in this context.
Of course. Opinions are merely symptoms of underlying beliefs, beliefs which also generate bias toward the opinions of others.
That is why I said you can't give your opinions without revealing a bias. Everyone has biases. There's no shame in it. The trick, which I believe you are able to perform, is to keep your biases separate from your objective criteria in other matters.
By your refusal to abstain from creating a herd mentality in your classroom, however, you demonstrate your lack of confidence in the rightness of your positions. Given a level playing field, apparently, your ideas aren't good enough to win.
That is as I expected. Most (or all) professors have that as a goal. The trouble is, you can't do it by showing a bias yourself. The student doesn't know what is fact and what is opinion. You should keep your (political) opinions to yourself, and resist the temptation to convey them. Either that, or admit that you see a loco parentis role for yourself in spreading your opinions to your students. You can't have it both ways.
Professional opinions or hypotheses are another matter, of course.
I suggest you try, as a experiment, hiding your bias and not allowing a herd to develop in your classroom. I suspect you'll see an improvement in the overall quality of the discussion. You might even get a paper out of it.
No it's not, yes that's right, but no it can't.
I think you're reacting to a misreading of the term "paper trail". The official ballot has to remain tangible, because it makes a chain of custody possible. That means paper (or punched metal, or whatever). Electronic ballots are subject to a range of tomfoolery that make the process unsuitable for chain of custody, recounts, and the all-important public trust.
The electronic ballots get counted first, naturally, and sent in. That makes getting unofficial results very quick, suitable for our instant gratification-based world. But the official count is done, by hand or machine, with the paper ballots which were printed out and (presumably) were individually verified by the voter.
Any discrepancy between the paper ballots and the electronic ones triggers a recount. If it's really bad, say a 1% difference, you bring in the accountants and lawyers.
You believe Moore's lies and distortions because you want them to be true.
Diebold is a fine example of how the small-mindedness of some people manifests itself. Particularly, it shows that proprietary softare and oafish business practices are next of kin.
But it has nothing to do with President Bush.
You defend Moore's dishonesty, but tout Diebold's ineptitude as evidence of President Bush's alleged corruption because his brother is governor of Florida?
That's some strained reasoning.
The point is not merely that a professor's grading habits may be influenced by his biases. Of course they are. If that were the only problem, a prof's academic integrity would be a suitable counterbalance.
It's not professors having opinions that is the problem. It's that expressing those opinions creates a herd mentality in the classroom. Disagreeing with those opinions means fighting the herd, something a young person finds difficult, and should not be forced, to do.
The problem is the environment. The professor is an authority with the full weight of the presumed wisdom of a civilization behind him, and the students are paying to receive knowledge from him. Students expect to learn, and have to have open minds to get the most out of their studies. Students shouldn't have to filter the chaff of political opinion from the grain of truth with which it's presented.
TCO also includes
Yep, it's important to look at the whole picture.
You should have simply rebooted to the XP side and run the updates. If you want the luxury of a dual-boot system, you should be willing to maintain both halves.
My policy for dual-boot machines is this: No. You can have two machines. I'll get you two monitors you can use dual-head on each machine, a KVM, your own switch, and I'll even clean the goo off your keyboard. But I won't manage a dual boot machine, and I don't want them on my network.
Why?
In business, there are two conflicting necessities: stay with what you know, and diversify. You have to stay with what you know or the competition (in areas you don't understand) will eat you alive. You have to diversify, or grow stagnant and then die when your niche has a downturn.
Google is diversifying, while staying in the ad business. It's not like they bought a shoe company or something. The cliche they'll use is probably "synergy".
Yes. Windows trusts the network. Think Active Directory. If you can trick a Windows machine into thinking you are on its network, it will happily let you be its partner (or maybe even its server) on that network. Though you probably can't trick it into being an AD client right off, you can find out all kinds of things about it, such as any shares it has open.
This vulnerability is an enabler, rather than a gaping hole.
What I hate is Windows' inability to route on multiple network cards. If a user is on a wireless link and they go somewhere where they plug in, Windows still thinks the wireless card is the active connection. It's been that way for years, going back to modem-PPP connections.
Also, if you have both a wired connection and a wireless (or modem) connection and leave the wired network (connecting over wireless (or modem)), Windows can't find IP addresses that are on the wired subnet. If you have a web server on a network at work, you can't connect there over the wireless/modem link. You have to disable the wired network connection, and then it works. What a design!No, it's like Cowards for Slashdot.